The reason I bring this up is because there’s a secret, third way of writing. It’s kind of vaguely situated between autonomous and improvisational. Spoiler alert: it’s fanfic writing.
In fanfic writing, like improvisational, you’re generally not creating an original world. Even if you’re writing an AU, you’re riffing off preexisting characters, relationships, and so on. But it’s not really improv–because of its unofficial, self-indulgent nature (not a bad thing), fanfic is all about going “No” to canon.
A lot of the time, no one is even making an effort to stay aligned with continuity. Which is understandable when you have a LOT of source material or source material that is gradually revealing its secrets (Better Call Saul, for instance, doesn’t reveal what becomes of Kim Wexler during the Breaking Bad timeframe until the last few episodes of the final season).
But, still, you’re getting a story that is supposedly of a piece with other stories, but doesn’t ‘play well with others.’ It might feature characters being different races than they are in canon. They might be gender-swapped. They’re almost certainly a different sexuality than they are officially, having a romance with someone that canonically they’re just friends with (or, you know, hate and want to murder).
Whole swathes of canon might be ignored just because it puts the writer in a bad mood. Characters who the writer doesn’t know well might be simplified or ignored. And there are a lot of common fandom tropes and characterizations and cliches that are ‘imported’ into a story’s canon basically just because the fanficcer likes them, when they have the next to no relation to the actual source material. Stuff like Kylo Ren and General Hux having angry UST instead of just hating each other.
Again, not a bad thing, or at least an understandably bad thing that’s easy for people to ignore… until those fanfic writters start growing up and going pro and getting to actually, officially work with the characters they played around like dolls when they were kids.
And this kind of fans running the asylum is nothing new. I’m absolutely sure there are Legion of Superheroes fans that started writing the comics in the seventies and doing a bunch of dumb shit with it just because. But I feel there’s a marked difference now between the widespread acceptance of fanfiction, the mass commodification of shipping, companies desperately trying to appeal to the social justice generation, and so forth.
Whereas before, you could reasonably expect a fan-pro to be heavily invested in a story’s canon and want to add to it like a brick being put into a wall, now you have fan-pros who will tear the wall down willy-nilly because they see no reason not to get rid of all the bricks they don’t like (or even that are neutral, but not ‘their’ bricks) and put in a bunch of bricks they do like. Hell, a lot of these ‘fans’ don’t even like the wall in the first place. They just want to put in their bricks because they like these particular bricks and they think every wall should have them.
Anyway, that’s why I think fanfiction has ruined mass media, because we have a generation of writers who aren’t good enough to come up with compelling original work, but they also aren’t disciplined enough to add to preexisting work in a way that respects what came before. They’re lazy and they’re self-righteous and they resent any criticism as poorly disguised bigotry.
Not me, of course. I listen to my criticism and thoughtfully rework my writing accordingly. But a lot of people who aren’t me just suck and won’t do research to save their lives.
